As I've been reading through this thread, I've been formulating a response. Then, in the last post, (as of this writing) Pinbuster pretty much said what I was going to say, but I guess I'll say it anyway.
There is a great deal of impatience on this site with lesser bowlers. It is the widely held belief around here that everyone ought to be working on improving their game, and if they aren't, they deserve no sympathy or mercy. This is an elitist attitude. Not everyone is a bowling fanatic. Many teams would just like to compete with others of similar skill and have some kind of chance to win against their peers. People who are not constantly obsessing about bowling and spending all of their time in bowling centers practicing and drilling up equipment don't necessarily deserve to get beaten all the time just because they aren't striving for the holy grail.
Around here, there are at least six dozen bowling centers within fifty miles--probably more. There are hundreds of leagues, and a dozen or more truly classic leagues with some major high rollers. There are two nationally known top notch scratch leagues. I understand that this enormous number of options isn't the case everywhere, and sometimes people want to assemble a stacked team for the pleasure of bowling on a team with their peers and may not have a league to join that has other teams of similar skill, but... Those options do exist around here, yet I see stacked teams all the time whomping on average bowlers in regular handicapped leagues. Invariably, they take it as their right to win. Much, much more so than the lesser bowlers, these teams have lousy attitudes and whine whenever they fail to score well and get beaten by a team that doesn't "deserve" to beat them.
Rather than focus on how the poor drones who aren't working to improve their game deserve to be cannon fodder for these stacked teams, I'd like to focus on why people put together monster squads to bowl in regular leagues. I think it's because they like being big fish in a small pond. They have PLENTY of choices around here to go and compete with the big boys, so I'd like to suggest that they take their show on the road and see how they do against competition of their caliber.
There are many suggestions in this thread as to how to set things up to minimize the dominance of stacked teams, and I think something should be done because we don't need more bowlers quitting the game--which some do when they get tired of getting clobbered by stacked teams with bad attitudes. Something that my main league does that works fairly well is to have two divisions. We have a division of ten higher averaged teams and a division with the ten lower averaged teams. This works pretty well, especially in the lower division where team averages tend to be within about 75 pins, top to bottom. The two divisions don't bowl each other at all, until end of season playoffs. (At the league meeting, I tried to sell the idea of having inter-divisional play four times a year in the 4th, 12th, 20th, and 28th weeks; but it didn't pass.) The upper division is also closely matched, except that there is a stacked team with a team average about 70 pins higher than the NEXT best team. Of course, this team dominates year in and year out, and they are no fun to play either. After divisional playoffs last year, they faced the winner of the lower division for the overall league championship. They lost, badly. Sorry guys, but that's why we play the games. They lost badly in two ways--they bowled badly and they showed poor sportsmanship doing it. Time to take that show on the road.
Another approach I've seen used with some success is average caps. These are not the kind of average caps that prevent someone from entering a league with a high individual average, or prevent someone from entering a team with a high average. The kind I'm talking about just gives the pins that your team is over the cap to your opponents. If the cap is 1000 and your team has a 1050 average, then you give 50 pins a game to your opponent, in addition to whatever the regular handicap is. High average teams loathe this system. They view it as being punished for having worked so hard to improve their games. Well, keep working--if you want to win. From what I read around here, that's what you should be doing anyway. Everyone should be happy--the little guys have more of a chance, and the elite squad has to work harder to defeat the system and win; something they should be doing anyway.
Shiv
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Listening to the monotonous staccato of rain on my desk top
